Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money. You have to be a part of the capitalist system. Its illegal to live outside of it. our national identity is enmeshed with the idea of private property - our right to it is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees that we not be deprived of it, any more than of our lives or liberty, without due process of law. The flip side of this protection of property holders, however, is a lack of protection for the property-less. And nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to real estate. The American Indian belief that man can no more own land than he can own air or sunlight was quashed with the arrival of Europeans. The ground beneath their feet was available for the taking, and over a period of three centuries, white people took it, until the frontier closed around the year 1900, after which all real estate in America was spoken for. The legal supremacy of private property - a relatively recent human invention - is cemented in the American logic, as indisputable as the laws of physics. If you step off the roof, gravity will pull you to the ground. If you dont pay the rent, the landlord will evict you. And if you squat in an abandoned building or sleep in an unused public space - under a railroad trestle, or along a river - you will be relocated for the night to an expensive jail built with tax dollars. - Daniel Suelo, from Mark Sundeens The Man who Quit Money
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 17:24:32 +0000
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